Considering that a vast amount of call centres a being located in that part of the world, and considering that there are a vast amount of computer graduates looking for employment. It is no suprise that this type of competition against Microsoft global stronghold as or will happen.

attacks on company networks are as likely to originate from South East Asia as anywhere else, and I see no evidence to suggest that this situation will in any way be eased by the development of a new operating system.

I've seen some of the work going on in mainland China at first hand, and it looked pretty much like Windows called something else to me. I have no doubt that something will come of it - the potential market is huge, and will get even bigger over the next decade. As for rivalling the Windows "global stronghold" , we'll see. Microsoft's teams of software engineers aren't exactly going to sit around doing nothing while all this is going on.

Well now, a sense of balance is certainly important when discussing network server security issues, so with my network admin hat on..........

The installation routines for many Linux distributions ensure that the door is wide open by default to reduce the number of technical support calls and e-mails winging their way to the network support desk. The more wide open a system is the less likely it is that a network user - or an application - will run into trouble trying to perform a specific task or function. As a result, most Linux systems are, in my experience, inherently insecure, and over the past two years there have been some serious security concerns about Linux servers.

Last year saw the discovery of a flaw in a software-compression library used in all versions of Linux which left almost every Linux server wide open to attack. Then, in March of this year there was news of a security hole which allows low-level users of Linux-based systems with shell accounts to gain full privileges, thereby totally compromising the server.

Statistics are always only as good as the methods used to compile them, and for that reason I'm a tad wary about quoting from sources outside my own sphere of experience, but....... statistics gathered by a security vulnerability tracking company (SecurityFocus) showed that in the eight months to August 2001 Linux servers suffered far more than did Windows systems when it came to vulnerabilities (Linux - 96 Windows NT/2000 - 42). In fact, the figures show that for five years on the run Windows servers have come out less scathed than Linux.

Of course, taking attacks as a whole, Windows servers will tend to be attacked on more occasions than will Linux systems - simply because there are more of them, as Webmaster points out. The figures available show that Windows tends to fare better however - at least to date it does, and that's what really counts isn't it?

I don't profess to understand all the inner working of these various OSes but I get the gist of what has been said.

I still remain convinced however, that Microsoft's global position will definitely be challenged within the next decade or so. As I see it, it just has to happen. These countries of the Far East, with possibly more becoming involved, really mean business and are determined to end the MS monopoly. Who will win remains to be seen of course. TC.